The Trust Economy

Last month I was asked to contribute to the London-based magazine CorpComms — a must read magazine for practitioners who work for organizations. As a life-long student of economics, I decided to focus my byline on how trust is becoming more and more part of the business equation.

Here are a few excerpts:

Corporate communicators increasingly focus today on the profession’s desire to ‘have a seat at the top table’. We should leverage and focus on trust as the value proposition to make this happen.

Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, articulates the benefits of trusting relationships: ‘Without trust, the best we can do is compromise; without trust, we lack the credibility for open, mutual learning and communication and real creativity.’

We need to understand that success in social media will be different for all of us. Some organisations listen better than others, some participate in areas better than others, and everyone is still learning what all of this change means.

Trust is complex and confusing. It can be dangerous to an organisation’s reputation when mismanaged. But, like other organisational factors, trust can be a force for enormous good both internally and externally.